The Details

As working away from the office becomes increasingly common, staying in touch with your colleagues can become a difficult task. It’s easy to get lost in a swamp of confusing group emails as you struggle to keep track of your workflow.

While a number of solutions have popped up to help remote teams stay in touch, UK-based Sazneo may have come up with the best solution for easy and organised group conversation that we’ve seen yet.

Based on technology originally designed for use by the banking sector, Sazneo is aimed at any group of people who needs to talk about multiple subjects, share files and keep track of communication with external clients and contacts in real-time.

Running as a Web app within the browser, users can set up any number of ‘Channels’ for different topics that they need to keep track of. Each channel then acts as a chat room, with easy access to seeing who is online right now and the ability to share files with each other right in the channel.

Beyond Campfire

So far, this all sounds very much like 37 Signals’ popular Campfire product, but while each room within Campfire takes up a whole browser tab, the way Sazneo is presented makes it quick and easy to keep track of conversations taking place across all your channels. An ‘unread messages’ count for each channel updates in real time.

Sanzeo has also made it very easy to keep permanent channels open for communication with external parties. So, if you need to chat to a client you could open channel, inviting any relevant members of your team in as required. One-to-one channels for private chat is also supported.

Chats are permanently stored, meaning you don’t have to be present at the same time, and the chat log is fully searchable if you need to remember exactly what your boss asked you to do last week or when your client said they were going away on holiday.

Keeping in touch away from the browser

For Windows users, a useful Notifier app is available, showing an unread message count for your channels and keeping you logged in to the web app even when your browser is closed. Sadly, this isn’t yet available for other operating systems, although Sazneo says that as it is Java-based, porting it to OSX won’t be difficult to achieve.

The main feature lacking from Sazneo’s solution right now is a mobile solution. Keeping in contact with your team while you’re on the go is often vital. While Sazneo works well on an iPad, it’s not optimised at all for mobile phone browsers. However, a mobile web app that will work across a wide range of handsets is being prepared and the company says it will be available shortly.

Sazneo is available for free with a maximum of five channels and 100MB of file storage. If that’s not quite enough for you, an unlimited number of channels and 500MB of file storage is available for $8 per user per month.

If you’re work as part of a remote team and find your current solution a little lacking, you really should give Sazneo a try.